E.2.3. The system of economic dependency on desire - Pt VI - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

The system of economic dependency on desire 

E.2.3. - Pt. VI - 

Here comes the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine where the «difficult passage» lies. All the aforementioned qualities in Anti-Œdipus - Nietzschean method, hypertextuality, repetition as power, style as movement of concepts and so on - reach a real klimax in this passage considered not only the «traditional cartographie» for the accelerationist movement but also the crux of the entire «anti-oedipal» book. As many have noticed there is no clear logical coherence between the sense of the text and the authors’ political position. Something eludes, slips away and it is plausible that a few Deleuze and Guattari’s scholars wonder if the two French philosophers may have misquoted or misreported Nietzsche. A very detailed reading of the passage -divided in parts- may serve the cause. 

It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it— an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? (AO, 238) 

If the capital is immanent to society and the desire it involves permeates society, what possible solution may we find if the two fluxes are so intrinsically integrated? If ideology is no longer an answer, as masses are not captivated by ideology but by the desire of monetary fluxes, what solution may we find? The claustro-scenario is nightmarish: from the very first steps there is no possibility of an alternative, of a revolutionary path - « is there one? » the two philosophers ask. Even psychoanalysis is of little help: part of the system, it is absorbed as anti-productive practice which «ingests and achieves» the nomadic profitability and slips into the social body. Moreover it has created a circuit of absorption of surplus value thanks to the desire produced by the cultural industry. Once Freud’s psychoanalysis has been overtaken whom shall we pass the baton of revolution to?

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